PARADISE LOST

by Clifford Odets
directed by Louis Contey

STUDY GUIDE

prepared by
Maren Robinson, Dramaturg
 Table of Contents
Clifford Odets: Early Influences ...................................................... 3

Clifford Odets and Paradise Lost ..................................................... 4

American Utopianism ...................................................................... 5

The Group Theatre: Utopia and Its Discontents ........................... 6

The Great Depression ...................................................................... 9

The Current Middle-Class Crisis .................................................... 9

1930s Currency ............................................................................... 11

The Playwriting of Clifford Odets ................................................. 11

The Legacy of Clifford Odets ......................................................... 12

Timeline ........................................................................................... 13

Discussion Questions ..................................................................... 17

Projects for Students ...................................................................... 18

Resources ........................................................................................ 19

2
 Clifford Odets: Early Influences
“Dear American friend. That miserable patch of event, that
mélange of nothing, while you were looking ahead for something
to happen, that was it! That was life! You lived it!”
— Clifford Odets, 1963

Clifford Odets was the son of Eastern European, Jewish immigrants. He was
born in Philadelphia on July 18, 1906. His mother, Pearl, who suffered from
tuberculosis and bouts of depression, was often remote and emotionally
inaccessible when he was a child. His father, Lou, was both an ambitious
businessman and womanizer who had high expectations for his son.

Lou Odets was obsessed with the American dream, and, as he grew more
successful, he distanced himself from his immigrant past. The family was
forbidden to visit his mother’s grave for fear they would see the family name,
Gorodetsky, on the gravestone. After moving to New York City, he added the
initial “J” to his name and expanded his first name to Louis. He also began
claiming he had been born in Philadelphia.

Caught between the emotional distance of his mother and the severity and
ambition of his often-absent father, Clifford Odets was a bookish child who
craved approval and a family.

He grew up living upstairs from an aunt and uncle in Philadelphia, then in a

series of increasingly expensive apartments in New York City. They were in
social neighborhoods, and Odets, always seeking family, was often in the
homes of his neighbors, observing their lives with his prominent blue eyes.

Odets’ childhood journals are filled with precocious and self-conscious

accounts of his dreams of becoming an actor or a writer. Early successes in
theatrical performances in grade school and high school cemented his desire
to act.

His father, however, did not appreciate his son’s artistic inclinations and
refused to send him to college, hoping instead to train him in his printing and
copywriting business. Odets was not a success in his father’s business and
drifted from job to job before finding like-minded actors and writers with
whom he shared ragged apartments paid for by bit parts in plays and,
occasionally, financial contributions from his mother.

Throughout this time, Odets suffered from depression and entertained

thoughts of suicide, even as he worked to educate himself in the theater, art
and music.

3
After a performance in a small role with the Theatre Guild, Odets met Harold
Clurman, who invited him to meet with a group of actors and directors who
were holding weekly meetings to discuss the state of theater, the need for
more training and rehearsal time, and the method of acting pioneered by
Konstantin Stanislavski. These meetings would ultimately grow into the
Group Theatre, and Clurman would become Odets’ friend and the director of
many of his plays. It was the Group that, for a time, offered Odets a family
and artistic home.

Clifford Odets and Paradise Lost

“The tragedy of our times in the theatre is the tragedy of Clifford
Odets.” — Elia Kazan

“I will reveal America to itself by revealing myself to myself.”

— Clifford Odets

In 1935, the Group Theatre and Odets were flush with the success of Awake
and Sing!.

Odets had been offered writing contracts in Hollywood but still clung to the
Group Theatre’s ideals and found it his artistic home. He also was struggling
through multiple revisions of Paradise Lost, afraid the play would seem like a
pale shadow of Awake and Sing! with the references to the family’s Jewish
faith removed.

In fact, he was striving to find a balance between the naturalism and street
language of his other plays and a more allegorical style that might speak to
universal themes. The play still features the slangy language Odets heard
from his father — whose favorite slang, always monetary, was “a million
bucks” — but at the same time he also used poetic, symbolic language.

The title of the play, a reference to John Milton’s epic poem of the same
name, suggests this shift to a more metaphorical landscape. Milton’s poem
retells the story of the angel Satan as he overreaches himself in attempting to
become a god and is cast out of paradise by God. He returns to tempt Adam
and Eve to their fall. While Odets draws on language that references Milton
— there are images of fruit, fire, sickness, death and failed ambitions — the
world of the play is a decidedly fallen one. Odets described Paradise Lost as
“about a man, Leo, who was trying to be a good man in the world and meets
raw, evil, and confused conditions where his goodness comes to nothing.”

4
In spite of some praise, the play struggled financially, and Odets decided to
go to Hollywood in order to help finance it. He experienced his own “fall” as
New York critics and some in the Group Theatre called him a “sell-out.” He
surprised his critics by returning to the company with 1937’s production of
Golden Boy

It would not be the last time Odets would be accused of compromising his ideals.

A 1938 article in Time magazine was heralded by a photograph of Odets on

the magazine’s cover with the André Malraux quote as a caption, “Down with
the general Fraud.” Attacking the general fraud was a task Odets openly set
for himself. With his earliest plays, critics praised him as a voice for social
reform, but even in 1938, the Time article pointed out the paradox of Odets’
financial success, allying him with the middle-class fraud he sought to attack.

By 1953, however, Odets, like his friend Elia Kazan, would name names in
front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Safe from blacklisting,
Odets wrote for film, television and the stage. Toward the end of his life,
Odets frequently told others of his plans for another play, but The Flowering
Peach, produced in 1954, would be his last.

American Utopianism
“From consideration of acting and plays we were plunged into a
chaos of life questions, with the desire and hope of making
possible some new order and integration. From an experiment in
the theatre we were in some way impelled to an experiment in
living.” — Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group
Theatre and the Thirties

“We cancel our experience. This is an American habit.”

— Leo Gordon, Paradise Lost

“There is no one so bitter as a disappointed idealist, no mockery

so sharp as that which springs up in the breast of a frustrated
utopian.” — Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group
Theatre and the Thirties

The United States has been an exceptionally fertile soil for utopian projects,
both religious and secular. Protestant religious sects and communities
thrived. From the earliest Quaker and Shaker settlements to the Mormon
pioneers, the United States has offered sufficient space for groups to attempt
their projects in living. Between 1841-1847 prominent transcendentalists,

5
including Nathaniel Hawthorne, attempted and ultimately failed at a
communal-living project at Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Between the mid-18th Century and the early 20th Century, there were waves
of new religious (mostly Protestant) Christian sects. These three Great
Awakenings, as they came to be known, seem to have been unique to the
United States, which already was more religiously diverse than most
countries. They not only informed religious life but also championed such
moral and political tenets as abolitionism, prohibition of alcohol and the
women’s suffrage movement. The third Great Awakening saw the creation of
religious-political organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian
Association and secular-social organizations such as Jane Addams’ Hull
House. Americans have a long history of exploring and supporting religious
and social projects.

Some historians see President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to the

country’s economic crisis in the form of such social programs as the Works
Progress Administration and Social Security as offshoots of such optimistic
programs.

The Group Theatre, with its tight-knit community and focus on the ensemble,
was a similarly utopian theater project.

The Group Theatre:

Utopia and its Discontents
“Without a home, homeless (or an alien in the home of his
parents — alienated!) he went out to find or make a home; and
he attached himself to certain homeless others, men or women
who themselves did not know what they lacked or sought.”
— Clifford Odets, 1959

“There were to be no stars in our theatre, not for the negative

purpose of avoiding distinction, but because all distinction —
and we would strive to attain the highest — was to be embodied
in the production as a whole.” — Harold Clurman, The Fervent
Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties

6
 “From consideration of acting and plays we were plunged into a
chaos of life questions, with the desire and hope of making
possible some new order and integration. From an experiment in
the theatre we were in some way impelled to an experiment in
living.” — Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group
Theatre and the Thirties

Directors Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford organized the
Group Theatre in 1931. It was so-named because the three directors had been
holding weekly meetings to discuss theater with their group of actors since
November 1930. Notable members included Clifford Odets, Stella Adler,
Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan, Howard Da Silva, Paul Green, Lee J. Cobb,
Morris Carnovsky and Franchot Tone. One of the company’s guiding principles
was that the plays were ensemble driven and no individual actor’s performance
was to outshine the meaning of the play. There were no stars, and the
playwright and director were not superiors in the production of a play.

The company devoted itself to long days of summer rehearsals in rented

camps and homes in the country. They studied movement, their version of
Stanislavski’s method of acting, and rehearsed. All their efforts were
designed to bring about an authenticity they felt was lacking in the theater.
The young company struggled; while some plays were well reviewed, there
were also financial failures and pressures. Many members of the Group
shared run-down apartments to save money.

Odets played several small roles in their productions but did not immediately
reveal his literary ambitions. Strasberg worried that Odets was not a very
good actor and expressed his doubts about his inclusion in the Group, but
Clurman maintained that Odets was “stewing” and would produce something
interesting in time.

As the Great Depression wore on, Odets and other members of the Group
Theatre became increasingly socially aware. For a time Odets joined the
American Communist Party but found it artistically restricting and
abandoned it, though his desire to address social issues remained the driving
force of his plays throughout the 1930s. Socially conscious and topical subject
matter and striking, naturalistic language would become the hallmark of
Odets’ early plays.

However, Odets’ writing was finely attuned to the two-edged sword of

American optimism and failure. He crafted plays in which dreamers promote
utopian projects even as their personal and familial dreams are being
destroyed. In Paradise Lost Leo says, “We cancel our experience. This is an
American habit.” It reflects not only the American failure to remember

7
history so as to avoid repeating mistakes, but also the American power to
hope for and to strive for a new future in which society will learn from its
past mistakes — much as Leo suggests in his final monologue. Odets offers
self-reliance in one hand and loss in the other, which is perhaps what makes
him such a uniquely American playwright.

Writing became a way to act on his desire to address the social problems of
poverty, homelessness and labor abuses. In 1935, the Group Theatre
performed his one-act play, Waiting for Lefty, in which a group of taxi drivers
come to the decision to strike. It was performed first as a benefit
performance. Waiting for Lefty was remounted, paired with his anti-Nazi one-
act, Till the Day I Die, with great critical success. Till the Day I Die was one
of the first anti-Nazi plays produced on the American stage, and Odets had
written it in a single week.

The audience response to Waiting for Lefty was even stronger than the
critics’. Clurman recounted how, at the pivotal moment at the end of the play,
the audience would call out, “Strike! Strike!,” joining the characters in their
moment of decision.

1935 was a banner year for Odets: After the success of Waiting for Lefty, The
Group Theatre also produced his Awake and Sing!, which follows the trials of
the Berger family in 1933.

With Awake and Sing! the Group Theatre hit a pinnacle of critical success
and social awareness. It rushed to produce Odets’ Paradise Lost later that
year. It opened to mixed reviews. But in spite of loyal audiences, it failed to
be the financial success the company hoped it would be.

Odets, who had resisted the lure of lucrative Hollywood screenwriting jobs,
finally left for Los Angeles and sent back money to help pay the actors’
salaries for Paradise Lost.

The utopian theater experiment began unraveling in the late 1930s as

infighting, ever-present financial problems and the departure of various
members for Hollywood took their toll. In 1937, after a harsh critique of their
skills from a committee of Group actors, Strasberg and Crawford resigned. In
spite of the financial success of Odets’ Golden Boy, the financial burdens of
producing subsequent seasons and the increasing pressure to cast outside
actors already had started a downward slide for the Group Theatre, and it
dissolved in 1941.

8
 The Great Depression
“Whenever people talk to me of the advantages of America,
I think of all these broken middle-class lives which I know so
well.” — Clifford Odets, 1940

“No one talks about the depression of the modern man’s spirit.”
— Lucas Pike, Paradise Lost

It is difficult to understand the juxtaposition of the Roaring ’20s with the

Great Depression. The change from economic security to financial duress
happened within a few years, or even a few months, for many families.

As Harold Clurman wrote in The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the
Thirties: “Between 1921 and 1927, society’s headlong rush looked as if it
would never end. Between ’27 and ’29, a slowing down became perceptible,
notes of doubt, fear, loneliness, stole into the picture.”

A set of government case studies on the unemployed between 1921 and 1929
compiled by the Unemployment Committee of the National Federation of
Settlements suggests that this anxiety was growing well before the stock
market crashes of 1929. The chapter of the government study titled “Effects on
the Spirit” suggests that, “The man who, with the loss of his job, has lost his
sense of belonging, and with it his place in the scheme of his own household, is
on new and unsteady footing. Under the emotional upset of fathers and
mothers is the sense of trying to build on quicksand. … If you have been
hungry, you may build up when you get food. But your whole outlook on life
changes when you have been discouraged too often or too long.”

At the height of the Great Depression in 1933, nearly one quarter of the
population was unemployed, according to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt library.

Clifford Odets and other members of the Group Theatre saw and experienced
the economic reality of the Depression. These hardships proved to be the
catalyst Odets needed to drive his playwriting.

The Current Middle-Class Crisis

In the book The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are
Going Broke and in numerous interviews with the media and before Congress,
Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren and her co-author Amelia Warren
Tyagi have pointed out some startling facts about the current American middle

9
class, not least of which is how two incomes are now necessary to come close to
the lifestyle that one income offered a generation ago.

The study shows that the reasons for 87 percent of all bankruptcies are job
loss, a medical problem, or a separation or divorce. In addition, research for
the book found that the pressures on families are what they always have
been: a sudden job loss and the cost of health care, raising a family, owning a
home and assuring a good education.

Warren, a bankruptcy expert, clarifies 10 misconceptions about the current

middle-class family:

10 Reasons America’s Two-Income Families Aren’t What You Think

1. Two-income families today make 75% more in inflation-adjusted

dollars but have less money to spend than one-income families did 30
years ago.
2. Two-income families today spend: 21% less on clothing, 22% less on
food, and 44% less on appliances compared to one-income families a
generation ago.
3. Every 15 seconds an American family files for bankruptcy.
4. This year, more kids will live through their parents’ bankruptcy than
through their parents’ divorce.
5. 1.6 million families will file for bankruptcy this year; 9 million more
are already in credit counseling.
6. Home-mortgage foreclosures are up more than three-fold over the last
generation, and car foreclosures have hit record levels.
7. More than 62% of families say that they worry about making ends meet.
8. The average family spends 69% more in inflation-adjusted dollars on
their home mortgage than their parents spent a generation ago.
9. The average family spends 61% more on health insurance than their
parents spent a generation ago.
10. Credit-card default rates are at a record high.

Source: Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, on the PBS program NOW, June 25,
2004. http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/middleclassmyths.html

Kurt Anderson points out the similarities between the American economy
disparity before the Great Depression and the present American economy in
a recent New York magazine article titled “American Roulette: In our winner-
take-all casino economy, the middle class is getting royally screwed. A call to
arms for populism, before it’s too late.”

“Back before the Second World War, in the teens and twenties,
the richest one-half of one percent of Americans received 11 to

10
 15 percent of all income, but from the fifties through the
seventies, the income share of the superrich was reasonably cut
back, by more than half. … Starting in the late eighties,
however, the piece of the income pie taken each year by the rich
has once again become as hugely disproportionate as it was in
the twenties. Meanwhile, the median household income has
gone up a measly 15 percent during the past quarter-century —
and for the last five years it has actually dropped.”

1930s Currency
It can be difficult to understand the difference in currency values between the
1930s and the present. Here are some comparisons:

• The value of a dollar in the 1930s is equivalent to $12 to $14 dollars today.

• In 1930, the average cost of a new house was $7,145; by 1939, however,
it was only $3,800 because of the national economic duress.

• A gallon of gas cost 10 cents; a new sweater was $1. New cars were going
for $500 and $700.

• An accountant made $45 a week and a doctor $61.11. For a laborer in

manufacturing, it was just $16.89.

The Playwriting of Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets was known for his skill with naturalistic language that
incorporated the current slang and the linguistic style of both the working
and middle classes. His writing is also highly allusive and symbolic.

In Paradise Lost, he not only refers to John Milton’s epic poem of the same
name, he quotes William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Mark Twain, the
Bible and an American missionary hymn.

He names his characters in a symbolic way. The politically opinionated and

fiery-tempered furnace man is Lucas Pike, and the newspaper reporter is
Dave Post. Gus and Libby have the surname Michaels, a reference to the
archangel Michael in Milton’s poem. And Harold Clurman, the original
director, is referenced as Dr. Clurman.

11
The family lives on Shakespeare Place, and Walt Whitman (Odets would also
name his son after this favorite author) is used as a street name.

Even slang is used to build specific imagery. The former champion runner
Ben Gordon peppers his language with slang, but it is also always the
language of success such as “four-stars” and “aces.”

Odets also was sensitive about the small roles he had played with the Group
Theatre and in productions with other companies. As a playwright, he could
rectify this inequality: Even minor characters have key moments in his plays.
Plus, he gives them great language and ideas that are key to the plays’
overall themes.

As a result, Odets’ works remain excellent pieces for an ensemble.

The Legacy of Clifford Odets

The “white hope” that Time magazine proclaimed Clifford Odets in 1938
never lived up to expectations.

Odets’ name is not as familiar as Eugene O’Neill, his artistic predecessor, or

Arthur Miller, who followed him. Stylistically and thematically, though, he
fills the gap in theater genealogy between them.

Whether it was because of his testimony in front of the House Un-American

Activities Committee or his Hollywood career, Odets seemed to lose his way
— and thus acknowledgment as a major American playwright.

Odets never passed out of the American consciousness. His plays from the
1930s are still produced locally and around the country. The human drama
that Odets understood so well and the challenging characters he created keep
drawing theater companies and audiences to his work:

• TimeLine Theatre produced Awake and Sing! in 2002. That play was
also revived on Broadway in 1984 and 2006.

• Remarcable Productions, a new Chicago theater company, has chosen

Waiting for Lefty as its first production this season.

• Shattered Globe Theatre produced Rocket to the Moon in 1999; Writer’s

Theatre produced it in 2002.

12
 Timeline
July 18, 1906 Clifford Odets is born in Philadelphia.

1912 Odets’ family moves to New York City.

June 28, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-

Hungarian Empire, and his wife are assassinated.
In the months that follow, Austro-Hungary, Serbia,
Russia, Belgium, France and Germany all are drawn
into what would become the World War I.

April 6, 1917 The U.S. Congress declares war on Germany.

November 11, 1918 World War I ends with the signing of the Armistice.

1920 Adolf Hitler, as head of the National Socialist German

Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei, or Nazi Party) announces his 25-point
program, which provided the permanent basis of the party.

1923 Odets drops out of high school.

1923-1929 Odets acts with various small theaters and has

occasional parts with the Theatre Guild.

1929 Odets understudies Spencer Tracy in Warren F.

Lawrence’s Conflict on Broadway.

October 24, 1929 The stock market crashes; it came to be known as

Black Thursday.

October 29, 1929 Five days later, there is a second stock-market crash.
Soon known as Black Tuesday, this crash causes
widespread panic. Most historians now believe these
crashes were symptoms of the Great Depression, not
the cause.

1930 Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford

begin holding meetings to discuss theater. Odets is
among a number of actors attending these gatherings,
which would become the basis for the Group Theatre.

13
September 29, 1931 The Group Theatre produces Paul Green’s The House
of Connelly as its first production.

1931 Banks suspend operations by the end of the year.

March 9, 1932 The Group Theatre opens Night Over Taos, by

Maxwell Anderson.

November 8, 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover

and is elected the 32nd president of the United States.

January 1, 1933 Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany.

September 26, 1933 The Group Theatre opens Men in White, by Sidney
Kingsley.

1933 American unemployment rises to nearly 25 percent.

1933 President Roosevelt commences his plan to alleviate the

economic privations of the Great Depression with a series
of legislation, creating social and public-works programs
that would collectively be known as the New Deal.

1934 Odets joins the American Communist Party. He leaves

the party a few months later.

1934 Clurman, Strasberg and Stella Adler visit the Moscow

Art Theatre; on the return trip, Adler studies acting
with Konstantin Stanislavski in Paris.

December 9, 1935 The Group Theatre opens Paradise Lost, by Odets.

1935 Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty is performed as a benefit

for the Group Theatre; it is later remounted and
performed with his anti-Nazi play Till the Day I Die,
with great critical success. Waiting for Lefty wins the
George Pierce Baker Drama Cup and the Yale
University and New Theatre drama awards.

1935 The Group Theatre performs Odets’ plays Awake and

Sing! and Paradise Lost, both directed by Clurman.

14
 1935 Odets, as a representative of the League of American
Writers, is among a group of artists who make a
protest trip to Cuba, to investigate the treatment of
students under Fulgencio Batista. He is arrested and
deported.

1935 Legislation to create the Works Progress

Administration, which ultimately would include the
Federal Art, Music, Theatre and Writers’ Projects, is
passed by Congress. The Group Theatre’s work was a
forerunner to this only American attempt to develop a
nationalized theater program in the form of the
Federal Theatre Project. Many Group actors work for
the Federal Theatre Project, and the style of acting
pioneered by The Group Theatre would strongly
influence Federal productions.

July 1936 In response to general discontent, the Group Theatre

reorganizes, creating an Actors’ Committee to
represent the views of the ensemble.

1936 Odets writes I Can’t Sleep.

January 8, 1937 Odets marries actress Luise Rainer.

1937 Odets writes the film scenario for The General Died at
Dawn.

April 1937 After criticism from the Actors’ Committee, Strasberg

and Crawford resign from the theater.

August 23, 1937 Clurman returns from Los Angeles to direct Odets’
Golden Boy for the Group Theatre; it becomes the
theater’s most profitable play.

1938 The Group Theatre produces Odets’ Rocket to the Moon.

1938 Martin Dies is named head of the newly formed House

Un-American Activities Committee.

June 25, 1938 The Fair Labor Standards Act passes, creating a
minimum wage.

15
 December 5, 1938 A photograph of Odets appears on the cover of Time
magazine with the André Malraux quote as a caption,
“Down with the general Fraud!” The Time feature
claims, “Odets defines the general fraud” because of
his Cinderella story and rise to affluence.

1939 Six Plays of Clifford Odets is published. The plays are:

Waiting For Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Till the Day I Die,
Paradise Lost, Golden Boy and Rocket to the Moon.

September 1939 Germany invades Poland and annexes the Danzig

region; France and England declare war on Germany.
World War II begins.

February 1940 The Group Theatre opens Odets’ Night Music.

December 17, 1940 Irwin Shaw’s Retreat to Pleasure opens, directed by

Clurman. It will be the Group Theatre’s final play.

1941 Odets writes Clash by Night. He and Rainer divorce.

May 18, 1941 Clurman publishes an obituary for the Group Theatre
in the New York Times writing, “our means and our
ends were in fundamental contradiction.”

May 14, 1943 Odets marries actress Bette Grayson.

1943 Odets writes the film scenario and directs None But
the Lonely Heart.

1944 Odets writes the film scenario for Deadline at Dawn.

May 8, 1945 Winston Churchill announces the end of World War II

on the European front.

September 2, 1945 Japan signs its unconditional surrender, ending World

War II on the Pacific Front.

1948 Odets writes The Big Knife.

1950 Odets writes The Country Girl.

1951 Odets divorces Grayson.

16
 1953 Odets is called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee as a “friendly witness.” He
disavows communism and names fellow communists.

1954 Odets’ writes The Flowering Peach, and it is produced

on Broadway. Grayson dies.

1961 Odets receives the Award of Merit Medal for Drama

from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his
body of dramatic work.

August 18, 1963 Clifford Odets dies in Los Angeles of stomach cancer.

Discussion Questions
About the Play

• Do you feel the ending is optimistic or ironic, or both?

• How do you interpret Leo Gordon’s final speech?

• What do you think the future of the Gordon family will be like?

• The Gordon children (Ben, Pearl, and Julie) all have certain skills, but
seem doomed to failure? What factors contribute to each one’s inability
to succeed?

• Audience members view a play through the filter of their experiences.

Does this play resonate with current issues facing Americans? How?
What lines, scenes and themes resonate most with you? What lines,
scenes and themes do you imagine would have resonated with the
1930s audiences?

• Why does Leo Gordon try to give Kewpie’s money to the homeless men?
Why don’t they take the money?

• What is Clara Gordon offering when she tells friends and family to
“take a piece of fruit”?

• Odets wrote an earlier draft of Paradise Lost in which Leo Gordon

committed suicide. Does that information change your thoughts about
the play and the ending, and why?

17
About the Production

• Music plays a large role in the play, how does Pearl Gordon’s piano
playing affect the family? How does it influence the play overall?

• The set is not a realistic set. How do the structure of the piano and the
presence of Ben Gordon’s statue influence how you feel about the
themes of the play? Does the set seem to change when the Gordon’s
furniture is moved into the streets?

• How do the costumes contribute to your impressions about certain

characters? How do the costumes change during the course of the play?

Projects for Students

• Ask students to write what about what will happen to the members of
the Gordon family after the play ends. Have them explain why the
family will do the things they suggest.

• On separate pieces of paper, write the monthly cost of certain fixed

expenses: for example, rent or mortgage, food, medical, insurance,
gasoline, commuting fees and incidental expenses. Put these amounts
in a hat and have teams of students pick a set of expenses. On separate
pieces of paper also write a monthly income amount, in different
amounts. These amounts may all be current income and expense
estimates. Have the teams try to figure out whether or not they will be
able to survive, given their monthly income and expenses. Give some
teams of students additional expenses. Have them compare how
income and expenses contributed to their success or failure.

• Ask students to write down all the slang they recall hearing in the
play. Have them write what they think that slang means. Then have
them write down current slang words and what they mean. Compare
them with Odets’ 1930s slang.

• Have the students form groups. Ask each group to write a short scene
in which they are family members talking to each other and then
perform the scenes for the class. After the scenes have been performed,
ask the class to discuss which felt like family members really were
talking to each other. What made those scenes seem real? What scenes
did not feel real? Why?

18
 Resources
Clifford Odets

Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets: American Playwright, The Years

from 1906-1940, Applause, New York, 1981.

Cantor, Harold. Clifford Odets: Playwright-Poet, Scarecrow Press, London, 1978.

Shuman, R. Baird. Clifford Odets, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1962.

Weales, Gerald. Odets the Playwright, Methuen, London, 1985.

Reynolds, R. C. Stage Left: The Development of the American Social Drama in

the Thirties, Whitson Publishing Co., Troy, 1986.

“Stage Left: The struggles of Clifford Odets,” by John Lahr, The New Yorker,
April 17, 2006.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/17/060417crat_atlarge

The Group Theatre

Clurman, Harold, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties, Da
Capo Press, New York, 1981.

Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990.

“Group Theatre,” American Masters profile, PBS.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/group_theatre.html

“Harold Clurman,” American Masters Profile, PBS.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/clurman_h.html

The Great Depression

Chandler, Lester V. America’s Greatest Depression, 1929-1941, Harper &

Row, New York, 1970.

Meltzer, Milton. Brother,Can You Spare a Dime? The Great Depression 1929-
1933, Facts on File, New York, 1991.

19
“Timeline of the Great Depression,” Riding the Rails, PBS program The
American Experience. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails/timeline/

“Effects on the Spirit,” Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the
Consumer Economy, 1921-1929. Case studies of unemployment, compiled by
the Unemployment Committee of the National Federation of Settlements,
with an introduction by Helen Hall and a foreword by Paul U. Kellogg, edited
by Marion Elderton.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/query/r?ammem/cool:@field(DOCID+@lit(lg1113))

“America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the
FSA-OWI, 1935-1945,” The Library of Congress.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html

“Money and Inflation 1930’s,” 1930’s History, The People History.

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1930s.html
http://www.michigan.gov/hal/0,1607,7-160-1581_19268_20778-52530--
,00.html

Modern Middle-Class Families

Warren, Elizabeth and Tyagi, Amelia Warren. The Two-Income Trap: Why
Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, Basic Books, New York, 2003.

“Elizabeth Warren on Debt and the Middle Class,” transcript, with Maria
Hinojosa, NOW, PBS, February 9, 2007.
http://www.pbs.org/now/news/306-transcript.html

“Who is the Middle Class?” Politics and Economy, NOW, PBS, June 25, 2004.
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/middleclassoverview.html

“Who is the Middle Class? Debunking Common Myths about the Middle
Class,” Politics and Economy, NOW, PBS, June 25, 2004.
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/middleclassmyths.html

“American Roulette: In our winner-take-all casino economy, the middle class

is getting royally screwed. A call to arms for populism, before it’s too late,” by
Kurt Anderson, New York Magazine.
http://nymag.com/news/imperialcity/26014/

20
Utopianism and the History of
American Religious Communities

Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia, Syracuse University Press, New York,
1990.

Kincheloe, Samuel C. Research Memorandum on Religion in the Depression,

Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1970.

Smith, Timothy. Revivalism and Social Reform, Abingdon Press, Gloucester,

MA, 1957.

21